Romney on waterboarding

Romney: I donâ€™t. â€¦ We will have a policy of doing what we think is in our best interest. Weâ€™ll use enhanced interrogation techniques that go beyond whatâ€™s in the military handbook right now.

Of course waterboarding – repeated partial drowning – is torture. It’s war crime under inernational law; as John McCain once said, we hanged a couple of Japanese admirals for it. It’s also a felony under the laws of the United States.

Author: Mark Kleiman

Professor of Public Policy at the NYU Marron Institute for Urban Management and editor of the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. Teaches about the methods of policy analysis about drug abuse control and crime control policy, working out the implications of two principles: that swift and certain sanctions don't have to be severe to be effective, and that well-designed threats usually don't have to be carried out.
Books:
Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken)
When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton, 2009; named one of the "books of the year" by The EconomistAgainst Excess: Drug Policy for Results (Basic, 1993)
Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control (Greenwood, 1989)
UCLA HomepageCurriculum Vitae
Contact: Markarkleiman-at-gmail.com
View all posts by Mark Kleiman

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175582/ has a brief recent discussion of ongoing use of rendition into the Obama administration. I do not know how accurate Alfred McCoy is and do not have his book, but this site may offer one place to start in order to check StopCheerleading’s waterboarding claims.

On the topic of why do voters elect so many sociopaths as Presidents…are we about to do this again?? Isn’t the AWOL behavior of the news media the major problem? How many voters are ignorant of the two generation Romney connection to Mexican drug lords & syndicates that ABC and other media won’t touch?? Seem some whistle blowers at the FBI have become a bit impatient.

“According to our FBI source, top level counter-narcotics, Romney helped run narcotics trafficking through Mexico into the United States.Â He also continued to work directly with Cuban and Russian intelligence, a relationship they say is â€œongoing.â€

With this short briefing is a stack of files, communications intercepts, surveillance reports, statements by undercover informants, one of which, an FBI agent, I spoke with for two hours.

When no US Attorney agreed to prosecute, the files and this information were leaked, initially to ABC.Â They said they were prepared to do a â€œspecialâ€ on this â€œas soon as the election was over.â€Â That was 18 months ago they have had files and met with the agents involved, under full secrecy.”

You will perhaps pardon me if I think that this report on a site I’ve never heard of, involving an alleged visit of Mitt Romney to Cuba, supposedly in the company of some latter-day Mata Hari, is a load of horsepuckey. The bit about how Romney must be besties with Carlos Salinas, because they were only a couple of years apart at Harvard, is another nice touch.

I yield to few in my contempt for Romney, but I find myself with plenty of completely factual, documented reasons for that contempt. I count myself fortunate that I feel no need to rely on the unconfirmed, the outre, or the absurd to justify my feelings about Romney.

Surprised that you didn’t get the reference to Diogenes as the difficulty of finding an honest man, especially in the political sphere. Also you could be more sympathetic that fighting the federal government establishment from the inside for forty + year in the name of the public good does lead to relapses into cynicism

Am disappointed in this kind of response from a university Prof who ought to know better than just blow off some evidence because it is merely too far out of what the MSM has brainwashed the general public to believe is consensus reality. Do you also accept the Warren Commission verdict on JFK even though Doug Horne as the chief analyst of the ARRB placed in the National Archive evidence that the Bethesda X-rays and autopsy of JFK were highly “edited” as in craniotomy and removal of his brain BEFORE the official autopsy? The conspiracy to COVERUP the true nature of the coup d’ stat in that event to hand power to LBJ also included using technology classified technology at the time at the NPIC to reprocess the Zapruder film to delete frames when the limo had stopped so that the data frontal shot could be fired and retouch some other frames which would have otherwise made it more obvious the fatal shot was from the front.

The absurdity of your ad hominem attack is proved by the fact that my politics is NOT left wing, as I am a “Goldwater conservative” type who is liberal on social issues, aghast at the takeover of the Republican party by the religious extremists and have supported “radical centrist” 3rd party movements since Watergate. And with my long career in the defense industry, I can make a reasonably accurate judgement on sincere whistleblower attempts to bring out media suppressed truths about Romney’s history of how he was able to make a profit of 17 x over a 10 yr period at a company where he was the CEO and single shareholder. Doesn’t that suggest a considerable lack of transparency and make Madoff’s record seem trivial by comparison?

If you and the other commenter had checked the source you would have found a plausible story that the Romney–Salinas business connection was based not on something so flimsy as possible Harvard B-school contacts but on solid intelligence records and intercepts in the files of the Mexican government and the FBI. There were also claims that the data on Romney was made available to Republican donors and ABC News with no response! How do you expect sincere government whistleblowers to risk their career and lives (Sibel Edmonds being another good example) when they receive such shabby treatment from normally rational people who ought to know better? The reason I posted this “teaser” was to see if anyone at your usually outstanding website had a contact in the Mexican intelligence agencies or at the L-3 contractor (US company helping Mexican government in counter drug operations) who could apply the Karl Popper test of falsifiability to the many specific details in the presumptive “Romney file”. Normally, when someone is merely fabricating a smear, I don’t think they would add such specific details which someone with the proper inside contacts could fact check. Unfortunately, my experience in DoD projects is strictly in sensor systems technology, and I do not have any contacts in the FBI or the Mexican counter drug community.

Since I met you once at a fundraiser for Wes Clark and have great respect for your blog, I think I have reason to be disappointed that you could be passing up an opportunity to blow the Romney campaign out of the water. Maybe since Wes Clark is now in your campus vicinity, he might be one with FBI or intelligence contacts to run the veracity test that you have chosen to dodge?

No difference between Romney(care) and Obama(care), yet another violation of our rights. The govâ€™t constantly violates our rights.
They violate the 1st Amendment by caging protesters and banning books like â€œAmerica Deceived IIâ€.
They violate the 4th and 5th Amendment by allowing TSA to grope you.
They violate the entire Constitution by starting undeclared wars.
Write-In Ron Paul.
Last link of â€œAmerica Deceived IIâ€ before it is completely banned:http://www.amazon.com/America-Deceived-II-Possession-interrogation/dp/1450257437

This is rather nauseating, but could anyone really be so naive as to believe that the Democrats have outlawed torture or that they care in the least about it. On the contrary, Obama’s record of steadfastly refusing to prosecute anybody for torture is rather clear, and clearly indicates that he is someone who isn’t disturbed by it or doesn’t think it’s illegal. And, of course, neither party ever mentions the very widespread torture that is occurring in America’s enormous gulag of prisons/detention centers/concentration camps. Especially the solitary confinement, which doesn’t seem to bother liberals at all. The dishonesty and hypocrisy here is rather amazing. The reality is that the Democrats have tortured just as much if not more than the Repubs in their history (like, for instance, the Vietnam War, begun by and covered up by liberals). Sad to see that those who know better refuse to confront these issues but rather callously use people’s lives and suffering to promote their own political agenda.